Hybrid harmony search for the flowline manufacturing cell scheduling problem

This paper considers the flowline manufacturing cell scheduling problem(FMCSP) with sequence dependent family setup times(SDFSTs) for makespan minimization. Based on the characteristics of this problem, hybrid harmony search (HHS) is proposed. It uses iterative optimizing algorithm to enhance the quality of the solution and applies a simple discarding strategy to avoid the algorithm converging quickly. HHS is compared with a classical heuristic algorithm and some state-of the-art meta-heuristic algorithms, which are existing algorithms for the considered problem on 900 instances. Experimental results show that HHS is the best among these algorithms in effectiveness. Thus, the proposed algorithm can be applied to FMCSP with SDFSTs in practice.